Emailing to SharePoint Online with MessageOps SharePoint Bridge

MessageOps just released a new utility (in beta) that allows you to send email to a SharePoint Online list. This capability is not built in to the product but can be achieved with the combined use of Exchange Web Services and SharePoint Web Services running on premises. This product is a significant change from their previous SharePoint Bridge product as it required Outlook to run. This version stands alone and so allows you to setup a mailbox that is continuously monitored and when email arrives, posts the mail to SharePoint Online.

MessageOps is doing a great deal for the BPOS community. They don't have to create these tools. Most partners don't. But they are willing to fill these rather large gaps in functionality left by Microsoft - to their credit. This of course brings up the entire discussion of why Microsoft leaves these big holes for partners to fill. After all, password reset functions without administrator intervention is not exactly and edge case scenerio. There are plenty of other places to improve, but I for one am really glad that MessageOps continues to innovate and provide really useful solutions for BPOS.

Kamesh Pemmaraju at Sandhill.com thinks so. In his recent post Winning Channel Strategies for the Cloud, Part I he concludes "Cloud companies have gained successes on the back of the cost savings, rapid innovation, and easy to use value propositions compared to their on-premise predecessors. But for them to really create a massive exodus of companies towards the cloud, they have to engage with the Channel" - A nice piece on the future wave of movement to the cloud.

This REALLY got my attention. As a group process faciliator, I've known for a long time that at any given meeting there is a lot more intellegence at that table than is typically harvested. Here's a look at some major new tech involving collective intellegence and transparancy:

"For the first time, we can bridge the gap between online and the real world," testified Crane. A challenge "thought impossible by the intelligence community using traditional techniques" was solved in 8 hours and 52 minutes, said Crane. "We leveraged the problem-solving capabilities of the participants," said Crane, and "built the infrastructure that allowed others to solve the problem for us." As Brian Ahier pointed out on his blog on healthcare IT, Crane praised Tim O'Reilly's "government as a platform" concept and Gov 2.0 principles in his Senate testimony:

There is a good convesation on the BPOS Meet up Group about Exchange Online and encryption. In short, you can get encryption services for as little as $9.40 a month that works with Exchange Online. That allows 5 simultanous users. That means that if you had 200 users, any 5 of them could be using the services at the same time. http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-hosted-services/encryption.mspx

Check out this post:

Susan Melchert • Any BPOS customer may purchase a minimum of 5 Encryption services at $9.40 per month. Once BPOS sets it up at MS, anyone in that domain, up to 5 simultaneously, may use the Encryption service. In other words, if there are 100 users in the BPOS domain, any of the 100 users may use encryption because it is based on active (encryption) users, in this case 5. If you or anyone would like to see it in action I can put together a Live Meeting and demo.